Various industry efforts have been directed to defining a standardized, modular telecommunications equipment solution. A leading standard resulting from one of these endeavors is the Advanced Telecommunications Architecture (also referred to as AdvancedTCA). The AdvancedTCA standard defines an open switch fabric based platform delivering an industry standard high performance, fault tolerant, and scalable solution for next generation telecommunications and data center equipment. The development of the AdvancedTCA standard is being carried out within the PCI Industrial Computer Manufacturers Group (PICMG)—the same group that created the highly successful Compact PCI standard. The Advanced TCA base specification defines the physical and electrical characteristics of an off-the-shelf, modular chassis based on switch fabric connections between hot-swappable circuit boards (e.g., blades). The Advanced TCA base specification supports multiple fabric connections, including the Ethernet, InfiniBand, PCI Express, and RapidIO.
The AdvancedTCA base specification defines the chassis (e.g., shelf) and board form factors, core backplane fabric connectivity, power, cooling, management interfaces, and the electromechanical specification of the AdvancedTCA-compliant boards. The AdvancedTCA base specification also defines a power budget of 200-400 Watts (W) per board, enabling high performance servers with multi-processor architectures and multi gigabytes of on-board memory, Digital Signal Processor pools, Packet processors, and storage arrays.
The PICMG organization has performed extensive thermal modeling in order to design the AdvancedTCA board and chassis form factors to support up to 200 W power dissipation per board slot. Other form factors (for example MicroTCA) have different cooling limits per module. In a typical implementation, the chassis uses conventional air cooling, with blowers pulling air from front-bottom to top-rear. Mechanical fans are typically the element with the lowest MTBF (mean time between failure), and thus thermal designs incorporate sufficient overhead to accommodate a failed blower. In view of the rigid board and chassis form factors defined by the AdvancedTCA base specification, problems in achieving sufficient cooling for certain specific high-power components (e.g., processors) exist—since the majority of the cooling capability will be consumed by such specific components, as opposed to equally across all of the components in the chassis.
Accordingly, what is needed in the art is an apparatus or system configured to dissipate greater amounts of heat per board in a given chassis (e.g., an AdvancedTCA chassis).